Exemplarity, pedagogy and television history

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Bignell, J. (2005) Exemplarity, pedagogy and television history. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 3 (1). pp. 15-32. ISSN 1740-7923 doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/17400300500037324 Available at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/23198/

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Exemplarity, pedagogy and television history

Jonathan Bignell

Abstract

This article addresses some theoretical problems raised by the citation of examples of

popular television drama in teaching and writing about British 1960s and 1970s

programmes. It argues that examples shape theorists’ and students’ understanding

because citing an example relies on a notion of a canon whose constitution, inclusions

and exclusions represent a larger context and history. Yet an example must therefore

exceed the field it stands for, and also be more than typical. This duality between

representativeness and exceptionalness is necessarily the case, and the article ranges

widely over recent writing to demonstrate its implications in academic work on

programmes including Doctor Who and The Avengers. It also refers to the processes of

commissioning and writing in the author’s own work and considers the use of examples

in different academic publishing contexts. The article argues for the reflexivity of

television pedagogy and publication as situated rhetorical practices, to raise questions of

methodology that necessarily but sometimes unconsciously energise the discipline of

Television Studies, and especially the study of television history.

Television drama: histories and hierarchies

This article thinks through some of the theoretical problems raised by the citation of

examples of popular television drama in teaching and writing about British 1960s and

1970s programmes. It reflects on the experience of designing courses and writing course

texts in the British university context, specifying the questions of nation, region and

international context that border the article’s topic. I consider what examples do when

they are cited in academic texts, and explore how examples shape Television Studies

theorists’ and students’ understanding of popular British drama. I shall mainly refer to

programmes, rather than audiences or institutions, since the canon is implicitly composed

of textual objects that form the locus for wider study. Examples shape the understanding

of popular British television drama. Citing an example relies on a notion of a canon (if

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not the canon): a sense of how British television drama is constituted, what it includes

and excludes, and how it can be represented by selecting those examples. In the course

texts of British television teaching, a programme becomes an example representing a

larger context and history. Yet such a programme must therefore exceed the range it

represents, and be regarded as more than typical as soon as that example is cited instead

of the others which could have been chosen. This duality between representativeness and

exceptionalness is necessarily the case with any example, but it becomes especially

problematic for teaching and writing about television because of the nature of television

as a popular medium about which everyone has an opinion and a memory.

Historically, the academic study of British television drama initially placed the

now-rare single television play and the segmented episodes of the prime-time high-

profile television serial at the centre of its curriculum and at the head of its hierarchy of

canonical programmes. George Brandt’s edited collection British Television Drama

(1981) for example, contains essays that each address a different writer’s work, analysing

selected drama examples in detail. Though valuable, it focuses on a limited range of

well-established male writers of ‘serious’ television plays or serials. John Tulloch’s 1990

book, significantly subtitled Agency, Audience and Myth, combines work on Trevor

Griffiths' strongly authored television writing with empirical research on Australian

viewers of popular drama and explicitly contested what Tulloch saw as Brandt’s

conservative, patriarchal and high-cultural canon. Maintaining the emphasis in British

studies on the political effectivity of television drama as an arena of political

communication, Tulloch’s intervention also questioned the hierarchisation of drama into

the ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ and signalled an interest in reception that would become

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increasingly prevalent. The divergence of focus between Brandt’s and Tulloch’s

approaches represented an active contestation of the canon and the theoretical

assumptions to be brought to television drama study, and the debate continued when

Brandt’s subsequent collection British Television Drama in the 1980s (1993) adopted

what has become a more usual structure in which essays focus debates through analyses

of specific programmes, rather than through writers. The 1993 collection included work

on generic formats such as sitcom, soap opera and popular drama serials as well as single

plays, but authors’ names still featured in each essay’s title. In his introduction to the

volume, Brandt (1993: 17) wondered whether the ‘best’ television drama of the 1980s

was ‘the golden glow of a setting sun’, and defended a text-based and literary set of

critical terms displaced by the ‘redemptive readings’ of popular texts and celebrations of

popular pleasure which had begun to mark a shift in television criticism since the late

1970s.

More recent approaches to television and the media in general have valued ‘the

popular’ because of its engagement with the day-to-day cultural experience of the citizens

of modern societies, and its ideological role in locating the social subject. Robin

Nelson’s TV Drama in Transition (1997) gives a brief account of what had become the

orthodox history, with its emphases on authorship, the single play, and a lament for the

lost ‘golden age’, so that he can demonstrate both how television drama has become

different (especially in the dominance of popular series drama and exclusion of authored

anthology plays) and also discuss the paradigm shift in critical discourse that addressed

audiences, valued generic formats such as the hospital drama and police series, and

diagnosed cultural shifts into postmodernity. Nelson’s examples reflect this sense of

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transition to different objects of analysis, and include US-produced popular drama and

drama series, with relatively few chapters dealing with the dramas that Brandt and

Tulloch, for example, had regarded as landmarks, and with no substantial focus on

writers. For Nelson (1997: 3), the shift taking place is ‘to figures of (individual)

difference, flexibility, dispersal, diversity’. Nelson suggests that this is a shift from

modernity to postmodernity in television programming, but it is also a shift in the critical

discourse that interacts with television and constitutes it as an object. But by the end of

the century, the pendulum had swung to the extent that I and other television specialists

perceived a need to re-evaluate the question of authorship and the definitions,

significance and legacy of the ‘golden age’ single authored drama of the 1960s and 1970s

previously identified by Brandt and others. The collection of essays by television writers,

producers and academics that I collaborated on (Bignell et al 2000) aims to connect more

recent examples (such as plays by the emergent writer Lynda LaPlante and the already-

canonised Dennis Potter) with that ‘golden age’ and to question its constitution both by

academics and professionals in the television industry. With similar re-evaluative aims,

John Caughie’s excellent study (2000) addresses British television drama from the 1930s

to the 1990s in relation to aesthetic debates on naturalism, modernism, realism and

authorship. It focuses on ‘serious’ drama, unpacking the assumptions about political

engagement, aesthetics, and relationships with literature, theatre and performance that

have been adduced to defend and legitimate authored television drama in Britain. Most

significantly, the book historicises the production of discourses of seriousness and

quality, and understands them as located in specific cultural debates that crystallized

around television drama but were broader in origin or application. This awareness of the

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historiographic discourse that constructs the corpus to be analyzed, and reflects on the

evaluative schemas beyond the television text that inform its production and reception,

was necessarily addressed in Jason Jacobs’ (2000) study of British television drama from

1936-55. Because of the lack of archive recordings, Jacobs was forced to develop an

archeological approach, reconstructing drama aesthetics from production notes, set

designs and scripts. As historical television drama studies grew and diversified, its

methodologies and its objects of analysis changed and were written about with much

greater reflexivity.

But the tensions in exemplarity that I am focusing on still remain, as brief

references to recent work can demonstrate. Lez Cooke’s history of British television

drama (2003) is organized chronologically, moving from the live productions of the

1930s through the single plays, popular generic series and political dramas of the 1960s

and 1970s to the political drama and heritage drama of the 1980s, and the high-concept

authored drama that also attracted large audiences in the 1990s. As Cooke (2003: 5)

points out, ‘periodisation does enable us to identify certain broad tendencies in the

historical development of British television drama’. The dangers of writing this

teleological narrative are explained, but Cooke’s insights into changing technologies,

institutions and aesthetic arguments can only make sense in relation to a temporal

sequence whose overarching movement has to be captured at selected turning points.

There is a necessary tension between Cooke’s (2003: 2) two components of ‘main

tendencies and important moments’ that leads to the choice of examples such as

‘landmark serials’ and representatives of ‘the ascendancy of soap opera’ that attempt to

crystallize historical processes through key texts. The same issue affects Michelle

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Hilmes’ 2003 collection, produced with Jacobs’ assistance. Though it does not focus

exclusively on drama, the book begins as Cooke’s does with a debate about

historiography. The awareness of historiography as discourse that I have traced in the

development of studies of British television drama is prominent, and draws attention to

the boundaries and exclusions that are my focus here. Hilmes’ collection has two

sections on programmes, but among these 53 pages there is only one essay (Wheatley

2003) that grounds a historical account in an analysis of a specific British drama

programme. Surprisingly, given the centrality of drama to previous publication on

British television history, drama is largely diffused into narrative overviews of periods

and critical issues in Hilmes’ collection. I shall discuss the political economy of

academic publishing below, since this is one of the constituting forces that Hilmes

scarcely addresses in the book’s preface (2003: vii-viii) and that I think leads to the

omission of British drama examples. But one delimiting force that Hilmes discusses is the

national and regional specificity of the volume, addressed in terms of the origins of the

contributing writers in the book, and the industrial and aesthetic influence of British and

US television production.

The issue of nationality is important here, because a widespread pride in British

television drama as being ‘the best in the world’ is constituted partly by citing

programmes originated by British programme-makers. Certain examples with British

provenance or thematic concerns are often brought forward as evidence, such as the

drama-documentary Cathy Come Home (BBC 1966) about the social problem of

homelessness, or the sitcom Dad’s Army (BBC 1966-77) that negotiates memories and

imagined histories of Britain’s homeland defence forces during the Second World War.

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But that national pride is also constituted against imported programmes (as well as those

that are perceived to be influenced too much by external cultural forces). With the

knowledge that the US television industry in particular has been more technologically

sophisticated and economically powerful than Britain’s (at least since the 1950s), national

pride in domestic broadcasting also has to deal with the widespread belief that television

was doomed to eventual colonisation and subservience to US programme formats,

imports and funding models. Furthermore, these caricatures of US television lent force to

an assumption that television as a medium was in itself a supplement that was added to a

pre-existing national specificity and would therefore undermine the family, encourage

audience passivity, smuggle American values into British broadcasting, and displace an

organic working-class culture. The immediate success of the ITV commercial channel on

Britain from 1955 onwards provided ready examples for these pessimistic arguments, and

it is significant that it is examples of BBC programmes and not ITV ones that are most

readily used as examples of the achievements of British television drama (and British

television in general).

The drift of these associated but distinct pressures has been to lend legitimacy to

writing and teaching in the UK about television drama that centres on a social realist

aesthetic, and values formal complexity, reflexivity, the importance of authorship, and an

engagement with contemporary issues that are recognisable from non-dramatic forms,

from literature, and from news and current affairs discourses. Canonical status has been

attributed to programmes that are based on cultural forms that have been accorded greater

prestige, such as the adaptation of ‘classic’ literature and theatre, or have assimilated the

related value given to authorship in the prestige television play or authored serial

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(Chapman 2002, pp.3-4). So the canon is slanted towards drama that claims, or can be

argued to claim, political engagement or to work on the aesthetics of television by

adopting new formal conventions. With some exceptions, this association has taken place

around high-profile prime-time programmes that are peripheral to the generic closure

supposed to delimit series and serial drama in the popular genres of fantasy or comedy,

for example. But the mutual definition of the canonical and the popular against each other

produces an illusory boundary. There are certainly programmes that transgress this

boundary, as the mention of the popular but canonical Dad’s Army above suggests, and

this demonstrates the current instability of the television drama canon in the face of some

of the issues discussed in this article. In devising entries in his edited collection of ‘key’

television programmes, Glen Creeber (2004) included plenty of British drama

programmes that do not easily fit this characterisation of the canonical, such as the ITV

soap opera Coronation Street (Granada 1960-), the science fiction series Doctor Who

(BBC 1963-89), and the sitcom Till Death Us Do Part (BBC 1965-75, remade as All In

The Family, CBS 1971-9). Creeber also includes twenty programmes (at least,

depending on how the criterion is applied) that originated outside Britain, and of course

not all of his selections are dramas.

There is a complex interaction in the pedagogy and publishing about British

television drama between a heritage of interest in the social-realist single television play,

a concern for nationally-specific themes, settings and topics in drama, and the valuation

of authorship. On the other hand, there are also more recently emergent pressures that

have redirected the impetus of pedagogy and critical publication. These include the

interest in the popular, variously conceived, the acceptance of the significance of

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imported and especially US programmes to British television history, and the

development of critical discourses that investigate genres rather than single programmes

(for example, Osgerby & Gough-Yates 2001). Added to these, academic interest in

audience responses rather than textual aesthetics, and the waning certainty of the

assumption of the political Left that progressive texts produce progressive viewers, also

lead to instability in the legitimating procedures that teaching and writing about British

television drama can use. This legitimation crisis has consequent effects on the selection

of examples in work on histories of British television drama, and the ways that examples

are defended and their theoretical implications explored.

Pedagogy and exemplarity

The rhetorical structures common in recent pedagogical writing and teaching about

British television drama in the 1960s and 1970s have some shared features and attendant

problems. First, the heritage of British Cultural Studies’ discourses about broadcasting

institutions demands work on programmes’ institutional contexts, such as the Public

Service obligations of the BBC and commercially-funded ITV companies, and tensions

between imagined national audiences in Britain and the economic need for programme

export to the USA. This extends into study of historical and cultural contexts such as the

relationship between the television medium and discourses of modernity and

contemporaneity, the connections between television viewership and consumption

practices, engagements with youth culture and the ‘swinging 60s’ as television addressed

newly-recognised audiences and emergent social concerns, and brief production histories

of programme examples to show how personnel, technology and economic forces

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impacted on them. As soon as a programme example is selected for study, it opens onto

a series of larger questions about the frameworks in which it was situated and from where

it can be understood. For writing and teaching require a response to the twin problems of

working on programmes’ meanings at the point of the production and reception, and their

current accessibility and significance for present-day students.

Second, methodologies deriving from literary and film studies have historically

been adapted for the study of television programmes, and their focus on the construction

of meaning and the aesthetic resources of the channels of communication in image and

sound produce dominant pedagogical questions and expectations of what the study of

television drama will include and what this study will prioritise. So there are implicit

requirements for work on the ideologies and aesthetics of programmes, which, when

addressing television of past decades, are often admitted as restricted and conservative in

their representation of gender for example, and structurally reduce political issues to

conflicts between protagonist and antagonist. The constraints of available production and

post-production technologies and limited budgets in long-running, low-prestige or

format-driven drama can leave the teacher, writer and student with comparatively simple

and uninteresting shots to discuss, in programmes that were understood by their makers

as commodity products rather than objects of ‘quality’. However, against this apparently

unpromising background, writing and teaching are often concerned to identify some

detailed but important features that make a programme aesthetically significant. These

might include self-consciousness of medium and reflexivity in a programme’s narration,

lavish visual textures or uses of colour, the remarkable appeal of some of its performers,

or its lasting legacy as the inspiration for subsequent programmes. Writing and teaching

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seek to demonstrate the seduction and challenge that encode programmes as emblems of

resistant political identity, either through gender or politics, or in aspects of their form, or

because an attention to popular culture is argued to be radical in itself. The concluding

argument found in this field of writing and teaching becomes a claim for the example to

be both typical and exceptional.

To exemplify these constraints and opportunities, consider the case of the British

adventure series The Avengers (ATV 1961-9). Academic analysis of The Avengers, and

also its popular following, centres largely on its later episodes in which colour film and

larger budgets produced an emphasis on a camp mode of performance, and a visual style

that borrowed from the emergent pop-art aesthetic of the period which had made a

significant impact on commercial culture in fashion, advertising imagery and elsewhere.

David Buxton (1990) for instance argued that The Avengers represented a Pop series in

which style predominates over content, making a distinction between this and another

category of the television series, the ‘human nature’ series, in which problems are

referred back to psychological and existential issues. This argument adopts the example

of The Avengers to represent the genre of the law-enforcement series, here inflected with

other generic components such as spy drama and television fantasy drama, and links the

programme’s textual aesthetic to a socio-cultural context that can also allow meditation

on gender representation, medium-specificity, intertextuality and intermediality. The

example becomes important partly for its own sake as an unusual and interesting

manipulation of these codes, conventions and opportunities in television, but also stands

in as an example of a certain generic type, a historical period in television and the wider

popular culture of that period, and a point of departure for large-scale theorisation of such

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issues as postmodernist aesthetic reflexivity that have also been followed through in work

on later programmes, especially Miami Vice (NBC, UK tx 1985-90).

What is significant to this article is not how different or new interpretations of

programmes like The Avengers could be offered that would redirect the arguments

presented in texts that teach about British television, though I am interested in their

arguments as contributions to the field of television history. Instead, I am mainly

concerned with how television pedagogy, as a mode of writing and teaching, is informed

and shaped by the different political economies of knowledge and cultures of study in

different areas of thought and activity. For the shaping of the canon of television drama,

and the ways that shaping could or should be changed, do not take place in a vacuum.

The television study undertaken by teachers and students becomes present as an object of

thought through these political economies and cultures, just as the making of television

itself is affected by the related political economies and cultures of television institutions,

audiences and practitioners. The spatial metaphors such as those of ‘field’ or ‘area’ are

suggestive of how what can be known, taught and disputed depends on the setting of

coordinates that map out British television drama. This activity of mapping is

importantly constituted by the choices of programme examples that are made, and how

those examples establish centres, margins, familiar and unfamiliar symbolic landmarks

that condition what the area or field might be. This article itself is engaged in that

process as well as reflection upon it, and needs to be understood as a discourse that

necessarily occupies an unstable position among these coordinates as it both takes them

as its reference points and also seeks to relativise its own position. Inasmuch as the

process of illustrative citation in this article is itself a selection of examples, it too is

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conditioned by the theoretical issues around the rhetorical function and the duality of

representativeness and non-representativeness that I have already outlined. The selection

of examples is both contingent and necessary, and one of the main points I want to make

here is that this contingency and necessity have contrasting implications. The

contingency of choices leaves open the discursive space for debate about both the chosen

example itself as a text, and also about its function as an occasion for discussion of a

broader aesthetic, historical, institutional or other critical question. On the other hand,

inasmuch as the example has a crystallising and fixing role in securing an argument or

building a critical approach, the example has an implied necessity and formative place as

a foundation that cannot be simply exchanged for an alternative one.

Memory, significance and dissemination

Television has long been regarded as a medium that has a special relationship with its

viewers’ everyday lives. In a sense, the scholarly study of the histories of British

television drama is a process of estranging familiar programmes, introducing programme

examples to readers and students who may find them very unfamiliar and peculiar, and

attaining some kind of critical distance from what is or was quotidian and taken for

granted. Writing and teaching about television often becomes a way to begin pleasurable

talk about the programmes people remember, half-remember, loved or hated. The

evidence for television historiography, inasmuch as it consists of programmes that were

once contemporary broadcasts and are now either not shown or are framed as ‘classics’

from the archives, must necessarily prompt a feeling of pastness and loss. While this does

not devalue academic study, it does bind it closely to the ways television is remembered

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by non-academics, students and the wider public. There is therefore a dual imperative to

address programmes in ways that call for readers and students to grow up, and to be no

longer affected by the regression that nostalgia involves, and also to imagine themselves

back in a past that they have either forgotten or may never have experienced. But these

pedagogical relationships to an example risk forgetting that the remembering of

television as an academic project cannot in principle be separated from the remembering

of television as pleasure in social talk.

This kind of remembering of television draws attention to the aesthetic questions

and structural interpretations that academic work on television has sometimes overlooked

by failing to pay attention to the punctuation of programmes by memorable moments and

the ways these are given form by social interaction and their placing in the narratives of a

life-history. For example, here is a memory of episode 1 of the Doctor Who serial ‘The

Dalek Invasion of Earth’ (BBC 1964), recounted by James Robertson of Swansea, Wales,

in 1988. In this episode of the serial, the megalomaniac mechanical creatures the Daleks

have invaded Earth. They were already established as the time-travelling Doctor’s

antagonists in earlier serials, and millions of viewers, especially children, were looking

forward to their appearance on screen. ‘The return of the Daleks was looked forward to

with great excitement by me, and my friends. I can remember everyone cutting out

pictures from the paper and The Radio Times and playing Daleks after school. Then on

that Saturday afternoon, about five of us went round to my friend’s house and we all

watched in silence as the episode was shown […] the ending when the Dalek appeared

out of the Thames had us all cheering’ (in Mulkern 1988, pp. 19-20). Collective play and

gathering supporting media materials reinforced the significance and meaning of one

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striking image from the story, and might connect interestingly with academic work on the

aesthetics of revelatory visual moments in popular drama. Growing up with popular

television drama shapes its pleasures and the ways that programmes are remembered, and

the theme of growing up is sometimes reflexively present occasionally in programmes

themselves as well as being part of the negotiation of their significance, as it was in this

Doctor Who serial, when the Doctor’s teenage grand-daughter Susan remained on Earth

at the end of the serial to begin an ‘adult’ relationship with a subsidiary character after

battling the Daleks. There are many reasons to select this programme, this episode, and

this moment in the episode as an example to explore histories of British television drama

though textual approaches, reception analysis, and cultural history.

But the viewer’s memory that I quoted above was not recorded in an academic

study concerned with ethnographies of popular television drama but in the fan publication

Doctor Who Magazine, and the discursive location of information raises questions about

the relationship between academic studies of television history and the dissemination of

its findings. Working on television that people remember connects with fan writing about

popular television, which often makes claims for the quality and canonicity of

programmes. As I have explained, the academic evaluation of quality in British television

drama has focused on its social realist tradition, or on its relationship with literary texts or

auteurism. Work on popular television has attempted to justify quality by claiming a

relationship with one or both of these traditions. Academic work has brought science

fiction television to academic attention and implicity drawn it into the canon (e.g. Tulloch

and Alvarado 1983, Tulloch and Jenkins 1992). Recent publication has also focused on

action and adventure television, and some of this work, such as Toby Miller’s book on

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The Avengers (1997), is also aimed a general readership, and uses the academic valuation

of audience activity and fandom as a justification for this connection with a broader

public: ‘The life of any internationally popular TV series is a passage across space and

time, a life remade over and over again by discourses, institutions, practices of

production, distribution and reception, and the shifts in tempo and context that

characterise cultural commodities. Cult TV texts are transformed from broadcast

programming into the property of varied and productive publics’ (Miller 1997. p.5). The

diversity of these publics, however, needs to specify how a textual object such as a

television episode changes its meaning according to generational memory, since its

exemplarity changes according to these different temporal and cultural contexts. Some of

Buxton’s assumptions about the examplarity of The Avengers that I mentioned above

reappear in Miller’s contribution, where the celebration of an aesthetics of surface (and of

the specifically camp style which can be regarded as a subset of this) is a mechanism for

connecting a segment of the general popular readership interested in television nostalgia

and ‘cult’ television, to academic work on gender, identity, popular culture and visual

culture in modernity. However, the most significant difficulty in Miller’s book is that it

pays scant attention to the placing of the programme and its reception historically and

culturally. Miller is interested in how different versions of the programme are

transmitted, and how spin-off texts and fan practices change the meaning of the

programme, and how it is repeated in different eras and understood in different ways.

But the freeing of the programmes from their contexts of production and consumption

tends to lead to celebration and too close a relationship with relatively uncritical and

certainly unreflective fan discourse. The example of The Avengers becomes a locus for

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competing as well as complementary discourses, thus losing some of the specificity of

analysis that writing and teaching about programmes from the past requires. Television

drama means different things for different audiences, and generational differences

between writers, teachers and their students have effects on what the category of

television drama is perceived to include and how representativeness and exemplarity will

be different for different age-groups.

There are good reasons, however, for the slippage between the academic precision

that I am arguing for here and the celebratory tone that I have drawn attention to in the

example of Miller’s (1997) study. There is some similarity of approach between the idea

of quality in academic television studies and the interests of television fans, who might be

assumed to adopt a quite different attitude. The criterion of seriousness, for example, is

part of both academic criticism’s canon-forming activities and those of fans. Tony

Attwood’s (1983) book about the British science fiction series Blake’s 7 (BBC 1978-81)

presents information about the programme some time after its end, largely for a fan

readership eager for the format to be revivified or turned into a film, and makes claims

for the programme that strongly contradict its invisibility in academic publishing:

‘”Blake’s 7” represented a unique attempt in the UK to mount a serious space futures

serial. It presented heroes who were not invincible and escapades which were all the

more plausible because they didn’t always work…. This book commemorates one of the

most important developments in television drama for over a decade’ (Attwood 1983, p.9).

The criteria of seriousness, formal innovation and realism are each present here, and

demonstrate how the different discursive locations of academic and fan writing can

overlap and complement each other. Claims to significance in writing for fans are

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connected with the pleasure of memory and with canonicity and quality, just as teaching

and writing about canonicity and about examples that border the canon of British

television drama are not solely disinterested activities but also pleasurable ones.

The reason for quoting fan publications on Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 is that I

have recently written about Terry Nation’s writing for these and other popular dramas, in

collaboration with Andrew O’Day, a graduate student and Doctor Who fan (Bignell and

O’Day 2004). The experience of producing the book gives me access to knowledge

about the project’s history and its political economy that is rarely available in discussions

of published work. In other words, it is possible not only to discuss these programmes

here as examples from the history of British television drama, but also to historicise the

production of the historiographic writing itself. Academic projects on television history

are conceived for a certain niche in the academic publishing sector, and the readerships

imagined for them affect the writing, as do the competing claims of different strands of

work in Television Studies. Writing about Terry Nation for Manchester University

Press’s new series of academic monographs created a tension between our project and

non-academic discourses, and between the readerships that we imagined for the book.

The series publishes volumes that each focus on a television screenwriter or creator of

television programmes, and this author-based approach has for a long time been marginal

to British academic work about television. Clearly, the remit of the book series as a

whole raises issues about the status of authorship within broadcasting institutions, and the

degree to which individual agency can be regarded as a coherent topic for discussion.

There is extensive non-academic publication on Nation’s work, such as articles in

the magazines TV Zone and Doctor Who Magazine, but very little work on his output in

19

texts with pedagogical or research aims. Choosing the discourse to adopt in the book, to

address which group of readers, was a major problem. The publisher (and myself as an

editor of the series) wanted the book to interest academics working on television history

and aesthetics, and also the large international readership of books on science fiction

television and popular and ‘cult’ television in general such as are addressed by Miller’s

(1997) study of The Avengers. The book needed to be accurate in its discussion of

programmes, and aware of the disputes and agendas in fan culture. For instance, Doctor

Who fans regard Nation’s scripts as formative in the programme’s evolution since he

introduced the most popular of the Doctor’s opponents, the Daleks, in 1963, and

contributed significantly to the programme’s shift of emphasis from historical and

scientific education to adventure drama. But fans criticise Nation strongly for

overshadowing Raymond Cusick, the BBC designer who realised the look of the Daleks,

since Nation copyrighted the Daleks to himself and made a fortune from the associated

merchandising. On one hand, the need to take a position on this issue meant that we had

to devote a lot of space to the details of production personnel’s work on Doctor Who,

with a danger of sidelining Nation to some extent. But on the other hand, this supported

our academic arguments about the collaborative culture of television production. In the

book, we note some of the evidence for a Terry Nation ‘signature’ in the repeated

programme ideas, plot structures and political subtexts of his television work, but we

stress the combination of forces of writer, producer, script editor, director and other

personnel who were involved in bringing these programmes to the screen. Nation devised

original formats but his work for his own series, as well as for series conceived by others,

was subject to extensive revision by script editors, for example, and the authority of

20

producers and BBC executives. Choosing the programmes Nation worked on as our

examples meant negotiating different canons, readerships and discourses.

When the book deals with the interpretation of programmes that Nation worked

on, we were also aware of the collaborative context in which viewers, critics and we

ourselves have made meanings from those programmes, so our focus on this popular

television is also in dialogue with academic criticism’s formation of canons of texts and

the role of audience studies as a legitimating discourse for selecting popular programmes

as examples worthy of analysis. Furthermore, the texts and practices that border the

programmes Nation wrote, such as his career in comedy writing, parallel and subsequent

kinds of text such as novelisations of his screenplays, merchandise, or fan-produced texts,

raised questions about what the textual objects under discussion were. Our focus on the

authorship, production processes and reception of popular television science fiction

needed to combine work on television institutions, aesthetics, production contexts and

histories, and thematic concerns. We were interested in how the concerns of television

theory shape the understandings of Nation and his work in the discipline of Television

Studies, and our project necessarily inhabited the conflict between an authorial approach

more customary in studies of prestige drama such as the BBC’s Play for Today anthology

of authored dramas (1974-80), and the focus on genre, format and reception that has been

important in studies of popular television drama. But since the programmes were

sometimes extensively reshaped by the contributions of directors and script-editors for

example, we also needed to detail the contexts in which they were made and watched.

The historical and textual study centred on an author had to engage in academic and

theoretical debates about methodology and emphasis. A chronological and individual

21

focus on Nation’s career at the beginning contrasts with later parts of the book in which

we address selected programmes scripted or devised by Nation, focusing on the meanings

which critical analysis, and actual or possible viewers, may derive from them. In other

words, the exemplarity of programmes was diffracted by questions of chronology, textual

propriety, production, reception, intertextuality and intermediality that challenged the

apparent ease of an author-based and programme-based study.

This problem of justification, which is addressed by identifying the imagined

interests of different readers and audiences, is markedly different from the assumptions

about the progressive aesthetic education offered by television drama and the study of it

in earlier decades. As well as arguing that television dramas might have an inherent

aesthetic quality, writing and teaching since the 1970s in Britain were based on the

assumption that the political education offered by television drama and its study were

their own justification. This tended to privilege realist and contemporary programmes

whose ‘message’ (whether in their theme or their form) was in itself of pedagogical

importance. The programmes chosen for study were often legitimated as ‘serious’ or

‘progressive’, and realist in the sense that their version of the real could be represented as

contradictory, and thus the viewing subject, whether ‘ordinary viewer’ or student, would

be pushed towards change. But this position neglects the context’s influence on the ways

the text is received, whether in a schedule, a course of study, or in the pages of an

academic publication, at a particular historical moment and in a particular social context.

For an apparently closed naturalist text can acquire political importance because of the

ways it fits into a social debate, for example. This crucial contribution of contextual

22

framing to meaning reveals that there is no ‘good form’ or ‘bad form’ in television drama

or in the processes of its teaching and in writing about it.

Access and exemplarity

An easy answer to hostile demands to justify writing about the history of British

television drama is to say that such studies are important to teach current students about

television of the past, to inform their understanding of the present. The aim here is to

provide students new to the study of television history with access both to accounts of the

past in British television drama but also access to the programmes themselves and

historiographic resources (other than the programmes) that provide context and

significance. I have just written a course text on television studies which includes a

chapter on television history (Bignell 2004, pp.35-59). When the original proposal was

being evaluated by anonymous readers, one of them commented that the chapter on

history was unnecessary, and students should be reading only about recent television that

they will recognise. I disagreed strongly with this view, and the book does still contain

the chapter. But one of the tasks in writing it was to refer as much as possible to

programmes that could plausibly be seen and studied. The canon is produced as much by

access as by evaluation, and these are intertwined. So it has become almost compulsory

to study Cathy Come Home for example, since it is the most repeated single play in

British television history and therefore the most accessible, and it is regarded both inside

and outside academia as formally and politically significant.

However, working on publications that seek to make television historiography

and theory accessible has to be done at least alongside more scholarly work aimed at

23

fellow academics and which looks respectable to people outside the field. I have been

advised by senior figures at my own institution and elsewhere that if I want to advance

my career I should stop writing texts aimed at student readers, because they are not rated

highly enough in the national assessment that measures British universities’ research

excellence every few years. The political economy of government accountability

mechanisms for academics leads to pressures within academia not to help form accounts

of the field that will define it for students. A difference of constituency is produced

between undergraduate work on television, and its canon, and research and canons

produced at more specialised levels of the profession. In relation to published research on

television drama, however, there are constraints on what researchers can bring to the

public domain because of the political economy of academic publishing. The expansion

of the teaching of television has led to a proliferation of books that discuss and

summarise existing research (including my own, Bignell 2004), but the unpredictability

and risk for publishers in presenting new research in specialist areas of the field has made

it increasingly difficult for authors to gain contracts for new scholarly studies. This is

exacerbated by the largely national character of television drama production and

broadcasting, despite the global television economy of import and export of programmes

and programme formats, and there is consequently a demand that academic work should

have trans-national or cross-market appeal to the general reader or to television fans.

Although there are now more academic journals with a remit to publish new television

scholarship, and web-based publication also offers new possibilities for dissemination,

academic institutions still expect university staff to centre their research activity on

conventional paper publication and to give priority to the writing of books. This picture is

24

a depressing one, and one that does not bode well for the creation of new ideas that texts

for students can develop and explain.

This is one reason to question how an emerging constituency of television

historians could be generated to work on the canon, but there are also serious problems of

evidence that their work would involve. There are some recent efforts to bring out more

DVDs and videos of past television, and collections grow in academic departments in the

UK as the recently-created digital television channel BBC4 re-screens old programmes.

But the decisions made by broadcasters about which programmes to make available

depend on a range of factors to do with assumed audience interest, among which intrinsic

quality and canonicity are only a factor. The problem of how to clear rights to

programmes whose original contracts did not allow repeats is significant, since

broadcasters cannot afford the time and effort needed to find original contributors and

secure their agreement. The canon is obviously shaped to a large degree by access to

copies of programmes as broadcast, many of which were made on re-useable videotape in

Britain, especially in the 1960-70 period, and were wiped.

Similar problems affect the scholarly study of television documentation.

Television historians need to know what is in the archives so we can bid for funding to

study it. There are no plans to make broadcasters’ and rights-holders’ catalogues

accessible, and we have to think up a plan of work without being sure that the material is

there. My recent work on Terry Nation’s writing for television included detailed analysis

of the aesthetics and forms of the programmes Nation wrote in their screened forms,

since readers would be able to view these programmes on video or DVD. But another

reason for focusing on Nation’s popular science fiction work for the BBC was that

25

archives in commercial companies would be much harder to access, and probably less

detailed and complete. Access and range of documents conditions the forms and

emphases of television historiography. Evidence from production files in BBC Written

Archives was absolutely essential to the research on Terry Nation, and we could not have

undertaken it otherwise. Archive material shaped the project’s conception and

realisation, and contributed to the already greater depth of scholarship on BBC history

than that of other UK broadcasters.

Arguments for a reflexive practice

The legitimacy of practicing television historiography and theory derives from the

institutional, ideological and cultural legitimacy attributed to different kinds of research

method and research topic. The kinds of critical investigation within television studies are

necessarily eclectic, and their epistemological probity is open to attack unless their

heterogeneity is sanctioned by rigorous investigation into the relationship between the

different epistemic regimes the work involves. Television study has a difficult position

within the humanities field because television is popular, everyone knows something

about it, and it is associated with leisure and private space. Since research practice is in

itself internally differentiated, discontinuous, and draws together different claims to

legitimacy, it is necessary to develop a discursive practice that reflects this. Television

historiography and theory should be reflexive and situated rhetorical practices, which can

be capable of at least explaining, if not translating, their insights into discourses that are

comprehensible to different audiences, including students but also fans and broader

publics. If television programmes, archival documents, or audience practices for example

26

are separated by television theory from the context of their production as an example, and

from an awareness of the subject-positions of theoretical discourses discussing them, this

runs the risk of fetishizing them as apparently unitary and free-standing objects. Rather

than assuming that approaches to television history are neutral tools, the eclectic use of

different methodologies should remind readers and students that critical approaches shape

the canons they produce. This means taking account of the political economy of

academic publishing and research funding, intended readerships and student

consistuencies, competing historiographic methodologies, and access to materials. It is

this analytical self-consciousness that marks the most recent work in the field (for

example, Bignell and Lacey 2005, Cooke 2003, Hilmes 2003). A reflexive approach

raises questions of methodology that necessarily but sometimes unconsciously energise

Television Studies, for the construction of histories of television produces necessary

boundaries which are determined by pragmatic factors (such as programmes’ availability

or length) as well as critical ones.

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Bignell, J., S. Lacey and M. K. Macmurraugh-Kavanagh (eds) (2000), British

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